Communication Failure

by Zieja, Joe

  “Hey!” he said after he removed his knee from his mouth. “I wasn’t ready!”

  “That’s kind of my point,” Mailn said.

  Rogers pulled himself to his feet. He was going to have a hell of a time getting out of bed tomorrow morning, assuming, that was, that the Thelicosans didn’t decide to blow them all to smithereens before then. He brushed himself off and tugged his shirt down. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn official Meridan Navy PT clothes. Well, he’d used them for pajamas every once in a while, but he was pretty sure that didn’t count.

  “Just wait a second,” he said, holding up a hand. His insides were starting to feel like they were going to become outsides. “What you said up in the war room about listening to the Viking. What did you mean by that?”

  Mailn dropped her guard and stretched out her neck a little. “I dunno,” she said. “I just . . . I think you could be good for her, you know?”

  Rogers felt his face turn red. “What are you talking about? I’m her superior officer and it would be totally inappropriate—”

  “Oh shut up,” Mailn said. “Just because I’m a marine doesn’t mean I’m a complete idiot. Anyone with a pair of eyes and their teenage years behind them can see you’ve got a thing for her.”

  Rogers’ shoulders sagged. “Am I so transparent?”

  “That and you repeatedly, loudly, declared your love for her during your semiconscious states.”

  “Oh.”

  Mailn didn’t seem to know what to say for a second. She sort of walked around in a circle on the training floor, losing a lot of her usual easy confidence. Finally she picked up a couple of police batons and started playing with them. The ease with which she handled them was equal parts impressive and terrifying.

  “No, no, no,” Rogers said. “Hell no. We are not doing that. I’m here to learn how to do karate or something, not cage fight.”

  Mailn didn’t seem to be listening to him, nor did she seem to want to fight with the batons. She just kept sort of spinning them around, poking the air and avoiding looking at Rogers.

  “The captain seems rough,” Mailn said, “but she’s got a good heart. When I got to the 331st, I’d left some . . . stuff behind me on Merida Prime.”

  Rogers didn’t know Mailn very well, but he would guess that “stuff ” probably included some black eyes. Parts of Merida Prime could be . . . preceded by ellipses. There were even locations where Rogers wouldn’t travel—and that said a lot. Spacefaring humanity wasn’t altogether so different from the times when it had been bound to Earth.

  “You don’t have to talk about it,” Rogers said, sensing her reluctance. “In fact, I’m not entirely sure I want to hear about it. We are literally at war, you know.”

  Mailn looked relieved. “The captain helped me put it behind me and focus on being a good marine. I guess I’d like to return the favor.”

  Suddenly, she snapped out of whatever melancholy her memories had put her in, put down the batons, and pointed at him.

  “And that means making sure you’re awake long enough to talk to her. We can get to you not saying stupid shit later.”

  Mailn took up a fighting stance again and, bouncing gracefully around the center of the room, motioned for him to come forward.

  “Fine, fine,” Rogers said. He shook himself off and did a few hops to loosen his muscles, which alerted him to the fact that he didn’t have very good balance, either. “So what are we going to start with? Are you going to teach me how to, like, throw a Thelicosan using his own attacking force or something really Zen like that?”

  Mailn laughed at him. “Hell no. I’m not here to work miracles, Rogers. I’m here to teach you how to duck.”

  Rogers blinked. “You were serious all those times? You’re really just going to teach me how to duck?”

  In lieu of further argument, Mailn hit him in the face.

  “Okay, okay!” Rogers said, staggering backward. “I get it! I’ll learn how to duck.”

  Mailn hit him in the face again, and their lesson began. It really mostly consisted of Rogers getting hit in the face, which he sort of expected. It also consisted of him sweating. A lot.

  “Okay,” he said, bent over and panting after a few hours of training. He felt like his lungs were trying to crawl out his throat and drag themselves into bed, which was exactly what he wanted to do at the moment. “Are we done? Can we take a break? My face hurts.”

  “We’ve only been training for six minutes,” Mailn said flatly.

  “What?” Rogers said, craning his neck upward. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Mailn silently pointed at the clock on the wall, which registered six minutes after they had begun.

  Rogers stared at it, disbelieving. Then the minutes advanced by one.

  “Ha!” he said, pointing at the clock. “See? Seven minutes. I’m not that weak.”

  “You are that weak.”

  “I am that weak,” Rogers said, straightening his back with no little effort. “Am I at least a little better at ducking now?”

  “Six minutes,” Mailn repeated.

  “Oh for the love of . . . never mind,” Rogers said. “Six minutes is probably enough for the coordinators to get to the bridge and get set up. This thing is supposed to kick off in a little while, and now I need to shower and put ice on at least six places on my body before I can walk straight again. Thanks for the session.”

  Mailn hit him in the face.

  “Stop that!” he shouted.

  * * *

  A tense excitement electrified the bridge. Unfortunately, a loose power cable was also electrifying the bridge.

  “Get that thing fixed,” Rogers said as another one of his communications technicians fell to a convulsion-inducing arc of electricity that blasted from the breach in the electrical grid. That was the fourth troop he’d lost in the last ten minutes. Not the best way to start a risky and potentially career-/life-ending mission.

  “I’ll take care of this,” Deet said. He walked over to where the cable was protruding from the wall, snatched it up, and plugged it into himself. His eyes, normally a dull blue, flashed all kinds of colors in rapid intervals. All the lights on the bridge dimmed for a brief moment.

  “Wow!” he said as his eyes settled back to their blue color, though they remained a bit brighter than they normally were. “This is amazing! Why did I never try this before? I feel like I’m floating on an electron cloud.”

  “Great,” Rogers said. “My offensive and defensive coordinators are nowhere to be found, my lead pilot is trying to argue with the maintainers as to why he doesn’t need a helmet, and my orderly is getting high. Perfect.”

  He sat in the commander’s chair, tapping his fingers nervously on the armrest and chewing at anything his teeth could find: his lip, the inside of his cheek, even the edge of his personal datapad. He was pretty sure his entire adrenal system was going into overdrive, and he also really had to pee.

  “Sorry we’re late, Skipper,” someone said from behind him. Rogers turned to see, finally, the two mission coordinators come onto the bridge. He’d never met them before personally; in fact, he wasn’t sure anyone had met them before, since they hadn’t exactly been running any combat missions for a long time. He was surprised to see that both of them were wearing giant headsets and some really strange-looking windbreaker jackets over their uniforms.

  “Are you guys going to go on a jog or something?” Rogers asked, gesturing to their jackets. “And what took you so long? We’re already running behind.”

  One of the coordinators looked at him, her expression unreadable. Not exactly old, she wasn’t exactly young, either, dark-featured and weathered-looking, with what seemed to be a permanent expression of a sort of nonchalant intensity, if such a thing could exist. In her left hand she held a laminated sheet of paper that was covered in all kinds of colored blocks, columns, and other notations.

  “Standard coordinator uniforms. You the new skipper, sir?” she asked. “I’m Comma
nder Rholos, your defensive coordinator, and this is Commander Zaz, your offensive coordinator.”

  Approaching the command platform with Zaz in tow, she extended a hand. Rogers stood to shake it, only then realizing that the railing in front of him was too high to shake someone’s hand over. He ended up sort of squatting down and reaching through the bars, which must have looked absurd.

  Zaz, on the other hand, made no move to look up from his sheet or shake hands, and seemed to be following Rholos mindlessly. Something about him screamed typical middle-aged white guy to Rogers, though the more he thought about it, that wasn’t really the kind of thing that could be screamed. He wore a tacky orange visor, as weathered with age as his face was.

  “What?” Zaz said, suddenly looking up. It appeared to be the first time he’d noticed that anyone else was in the room.

  Rholos tapped her headset, and Commander Zaz took off his own.

  “Oh, hi, Skipper. We’re gonna do this today, okay? Don’t worry about it. It’s just like practice.”

  Rogers raised an eyebrow. “We practice?”

  Zaz didn’t seem to hear him as he simply readjusted his headset and began pacing around the bridge, staring at the laminated sheet of whatever-it-was. Rholos gave him a reassuring nod, replaced her own headset, and did the same.

  Not knowing what else to do, Rogers sat back down in the commander’s chair. He wasn’t entirely sure what these people’s jobs were, but he sure as hell hoped they took the majority of the burden of figuring out how to not get everyone killed.

  “Relax,” Commander Belgrave said, apparently reading Rogers’ nervousness on his face. “You’re the skipper, not the tactician. Remember that everyone under your command is a professional, and treat them like it.”

  “I can see my brain!” Deet screamed, his eyes flashing yellow.

  “Would somebody please unplug him?” Rogers said. He turned back to Belgrave. “Since when did you become a fountain of leadership wisdom?”

  Belgrave shrugged, leaning back in his chair. “I’ve sat up here for a lot of hours, sir. I know a little bit about what a good skipper does and what a bad skipper does.”

  Rogers frowned. “That reminds me. Who was running the fleet for the few days I was out? I never got any reports or anything.”

  “Oh,” Belgrave said. He pointed ambiguously to some console or other, the function of which Rogers had no idea about. “For short absences, we use CARL.”

  “Um,” Rogers said. “Carl?”

  “No, not Carl. CARL,” Belgrave said, emphasizing the acronym. “It’s the Command Automated Response Lexicon. It makes the ship’s decisions in the event of the boss’s—and his deputy’s—absence.”

  Rogers couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Are you serious? Didn’t we just go through a whole big giant drama where automated intelligence platforms became self-aware, started slowly taking over the ship, and then eventually almost built a giant bomb and killed us all? Do you really think it’s a good idea to give all that responsibility to a computer?”

  Belgrave’s brow furrowed in confusion. “I said it was making the fleet admiral’s daily decisions, not doing long division. CARL is sufficient to keep us afloat for weeks at a time, but it’s vastly inferior intellectually to our advanced droids.”

  “Oh man, I am crashing so hard right now,” Deet said as he spun dizzily around the corner of the bridge. Getting electricity intravenously apparently didn’t do good things for him. Or maybe it did really good things for him. Rogers wasn’t sure, but he could tell by looking at Deet that he wouldn’t be of much use for a while. Deet kept slowly extending one hand in front of him, unfolding his fingers, folding them again, and then dropping his arm.

  “Are we going to do this or not?” Rogers said impatiently. “Someone get me Lieutenant Lieutenant Flash, or whatever his name is.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After a few minutes of waiting, the pilot’s voice came across the communications system.

  “Hey, hey, baby, what’s up?”

  “Hey, baby?” Rogers said. “Are you even close to being ready? What’s going on in the hangar?”

  “Man,” Flash said, “don’t be so cold or you’ll freeze my engines. Me and the rest of the Raging Ravagers are suited up and ready to go. We’re just waiting for space traffic control to clear us and our ordnance to get loaded. I can’t wait to pickle a couple of these Lancers.”

  Despite not knowing how Flash intended to brine or pickle anything, Rogers couldn’t help but notice the last word of the pilot’s sentence. Lancers were a very volatile, very expensive, and very deadly weapon that definitely would not be the weapon of choice for a routine mission to turn a couple of jamming platforms into space debris. They were mostly for damaging larger ships that had their shield generators destroyed; they wouldn’t work on shielded craft.

  “Lancers?” Rogers asked. “Why are you bringing Lancers?”

  “Look,” Flash said. “I told you I had this covered, and that you didn’t need an intel weenie to plan this mission. The Lancers are the best weapon we have for nonshielded stuff, and these jammers aren’t shielded. Do you know how many plasma cannon shots it would take to blow one of these up?”

  Rogers thought a moment. He hadn’t been on weapons loading detail in a long, long time, but he seemed to remember plasma cannons, the basic armament of any spacefaring platform, as adequate for blowing up just about anything.

  “One?”

  “Whatever,” Flash said. “Just let me do my job. We’ll need the plasma rounds if their fighters come at us.”

  “Why the hell would you use plasma cannons against fighters? Why not use Hellhawk missiles? That’s what they’re for!”

  A long, drawn-out sigh came over the speaker system.

  “Because cannons, man. They’re flashy. See you out in the black stuff !”

  The comms clicked off, leaving Rogers with something much less than confidence and only slightly less than sheer terror.

  “I told you he was an idiot,” Deet said, seemingly recovered from his daze. He walked over and stood next to Rogers on the command platform, looking out at the displays. Rholos and Zaz were pacing back and forth, talking animatedly into their microphones, though Rogers couldn’t make out what they were saying. For some reason, they were using the laminated sheets to cover their mouths so that he couldn’t read their lips, either. It was a very strange sight and did not at all help his rising confusion and moderate panic about sending men and women into combat.

  “I didn’t have much of a choice,” he said. “A lot of people think I’m an idiot, too, and here I am commanding the whole fleet.”

  Belgrave shot him a look.

  “Alright, sir,” Zaz said. “Everything is ready.”

  Rogers settled into his command chair and took a deep breath. He sure hoped Flash knew what he was doing, because Rogers absolutely did not. He opened his mouth to give the word to begin the mission, but he thought there was some kind of protocol that required him to say something specific or dramatic. Klein was always making speeches and getting dramatic slow-motion salutes and all that. This was his first big act as acting admiral of the fleet; he needed to make it good.

  “Go” seemed like a weak choice for weak men. “To victory!” was cheesy. Simply giving a sort of karate chop in the air to indicate forward movement might be misinterpreted or hurt his shoulder. So he settled on something he knew much more about than being a commander: gambling.

  “Okay, everyone, we’ve got a pair of deuces, no chips, and here comes the flop. We’re all in.”

  The bridge completely stopped. Every head turned in his direction. He prepared himself for the resounding cheer that he knew was about to rock the Flagship.

  “We’re going to flop?” someone said. “I don’t want to flop. I thought we were supposed to win?”

  “Admiral Klein always said things like achieving battlespace effects with synergistic combat agility.”

  “That didn’t make any s
ense, either.”

  “Yeah, but at least it was about war.”

  “If we have a pair of deuces, does that mean we have a four? I don’t know the rules of baccarat.”

  “Just go blow things up!” Rogers screamed.

  “Yes, sir!” came the resounding response.

  Boioioing

  “We must visit an inverse sine wave of destruction on the Meridan fleet!” Commodore Zergan cried.

  Alandra folded her arms and looked out from the bridge, thinking. She took a deep breath. A wave of destruction would have seemed like a good idea in any other situation, but here it seemed somehow counterproductive.

  “Not yet,” she said slowly. Let Zergan persist in his opinion that she was trying to goad the Meridans into drawing first blood. “Stick to the plan.”

  Zergan glanced at her sideways, his expression unreadable. Likely he was starting to figure out that maybe this hadn’t been her plan; he wasn’t easy to fool. Alandra tried to remain impassive. She was trying to facilitate an opportunity and regain ground lost due to her communications technician’s failure. Had he simply transmitted the right message, this never would have happened.

  It certainly wasn’t Alandra’s fault that she had kicked him in the ear and damaged his hearing before giving him the message to transmit.

  Secretary Quinn, who had been making herself relatively scarce over the last few days, was waiting silently on the bridge, her hawkish gaze looking feverishly for something to criticize.

  “I hope you did your calculus today,” she muttered. “Because, Science help you, you’re going to need it.”

  Alandra ignored her. Of course she’d done her calculus today. No self-respecting Thelicosan, particularly not one in a position of power like she was, would shirk her religious obligations for something so mundane and simple as war. After all, war was merely the continuation of math by other means.

  Yet, for all that she had felt confident in her plan, now she was feeling confused and lost. It was a rare occasion when she didn’t know exactly what to do at any given moment; she wasn’t used to being at the whim of her enemy. In a way, it was kind of thrilling. Sacrificing Thelicosan lives hadn’t been a part of her plan. While she wanted to let Captain Rogers be in control and help dictate the resolution of this problem, she didn’t want him killing anyone. If this indeed was an offensive action that would kill Thelicosans, she’d be forced to act.